Zionism

Biblical Studies Carnival XXIII

Before pooping out from exhaustion, I visited
and explored a string of blogs each of which, in the month of October, had
something of interest for connoisseurs of the Bible and all others who want to
know more about the ways in which the Bible is used and abused today. I report on
the salacious details in this post.

The format of this carnival is simple. I link
to representative posts from a wide selection of blogs. The purpose: to
introduce a bunch of bloggers to each other who will come, hopefully, to see
for themselves what nastiness and spite or fulsome praise I inflict upon a
post of theirs, or that of a fellow. I ask questions. I desire answers. Polite
bloggers will link to this carnival and comment as they see fit.

Tis the season of Halloween. Is there a
better blog to start with than Kim Paffenroth’s Gospel of the Living Dead? What’s a Bible
scholar doing at Zombie Fests and World Horror Conventions? How is it that
somebody with a MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD in Bible and theology from Notre Dame is writing titles like Dying
to Live to rave reviews at Fear Zone? Kim has
some explaining to do. He would help us if he situated his work within the
stream of horror that stretches from Ezekiel 38-39 to the Apocalypse of St.
John, Dante, Kafka, and Charles Williams. Perhaps he already has, but his blog
lacks an adequate index or introduction of terms (what is this History is
Dead thing, anyway?).

Tim Glass at A Word on the Word passes on a list
of the “Top Ten Bible Verses Used On-line.” They are the usual suspects, and
represent the prism through which many evangelicals force all of Scripture. Tim
just finished blogging the story of his journey out of evangelicalism into
Catholicism. If Tim had to list the top ten verses one needs to know to
understand what Scripture teaches, what would they be?

There are a number of bloggers who read biblical
texts in full awareness of the first historical contexts in which they were
read but who are also interested in pursuing interpretation that does a measure
of justice to the reception the texts received in later tradition. The same
bloggers also seem interested in the Bible as a source of insight in the
contemporary scene.

The approach is sometimes referred to as
canonical exegesis in the sense that Brevard Childs conceived of it. Actually,
a seismic shift seems underway that goes far beyond the provocation of a single
scholar. It is evident from the structure of conferences like this one in the
Twin Cities and this
one in Rome that it is becoming commonplace to study scripture as one
component in a larger religious tradition and from the point of view of its
history of reception. I refer the reader to Phil Sumpter’s blog, and to his recent
posts on the canonical
approach. Stephen on his blog
has been going toe-to-toe with Phil, in comments and posting
of his own.

A number of excellent bloggers have acknowledged
their indebtedness to Childs. A short list: Daniel Driver (three
posts just in October, but be sure to read this
and browse through this),
Kevin Wilson (here),
Stephen Cook (here),
and Frank Logue (here);
a commenter extraordinaire, John Poirier (see Phil’s blog), also deserves
mention. But I’m not happy. This crew seems unaware of the groundbreaking work
Michael Fishbane has done in the field of canonical exegesis. More on that in a
follow-up post.

The best Bible bloggers out there, I think,
are those who write in such a way as to attract comments and generate
discussion among the kind of people one meets in a MacDonald’s restaurant, the
bowling alley, or at an Ayn Rand get-together. The author of Bible study by a student notes the
following: “I write mostly about biblical subjects. I receive many comments
from those who do not believe in the God of the Bible, or any God. I really
like those comments, even when they say I have the brain of a grapefruit,
because they make you think and rethink what you have said.” Scholarly bloggers
might learn a thing or two by visiting and interacting with bloggers like “a
student.” Conversely, bloggers like “a student” might benefit from interacting
with scholarly bloggers. The potential of blogdom to become a place of
cross-fertilization across different social registers is enormous.

I’ve been mapping Bible blogdom. See the post
following this one. I pigeon-hole bloggers as follows: laypeople; students;
clergy; Bible translators; scholars who are not professors; professors. Reality
can often be mapped by a Venn diagram (but not the Trinity; that’s my
contribution to Nick Norelli’s call
for a blogathon on that topic). The reality of biblioblogdom is no exception. The
categories Bible bloggers belong to overlap and diagram out in interesting
ways.

My mapping is woefully incomplete, but I knew
if I looked hard enough, I would find a 16 year old Bible blogger. She is Karen
Kovaka, and her blog is named Rhetorical
Response. She has a series on literary analysis, including a post entitled The Bible
as Literature. She knows her way around literature and theology. I hope she
blogs more on the Bible.

The discussions in any venue I enjoy most involve
people who come from very different places but who show an interest in learning
from one another. A Venn diagram gone interactive, if you will. The discussion
around “Literary Translation” was a bit like that. Insightful laypeople like Iyov
and Kevin
Edgecomb, professors like Rich
Rhodes and Carl
Conrad, clergy like Doug
Chaplin, Bible translators like Wayne
Leman, Peter
Kirk, and Lingamish,
and students like J.
K. Gayle all joined the discussion and made signal contributions. For a
roundup, go here,
here,
here,
and here.
The discussion intersected with the wild and wooly Psalm 68 blogathon, which
Tim Bulkeley chronicled
last month, and with a series of posts on Psalm 51 (here,
here,
and here)
sparked by comments by Wayne Leman. Thanks to Suzanne
McCarthy and Bob
MacDonald, the Psalm 68 blogabout is not over yet.

Have you noticed? Online discourse is
becoming an accepted form of academic discourse. Note this item on the
website of the Society of Biblical Literature. Voices to the contrary
notwithstanding - Jim West’s post
serves fair warning to those who blog and seem not to know that we live in this
kind of world – blogging has become a plus, not a liability, for an upcoming
scholar. Note this
comment by Iyov. If you can stand the heat, blogging is a great kitchen
from which a scholar, aspiring or otherwise, may test out, refine, and serve on
a golden platter his or her ideas.

But let me add a nasty comment. Too many
bloggers use sloppy
(I should do that more often; look at all the comments that resulted), ungrammatical
prose (the content makes up for it), and spell atrociously, even
in the title (but the misspelling fits the subject matter discussed). Not a
good idea if you want a college or university to hire you in the future! On
every board that does a first hire or reviews tenure, there sits at least one
extremely anal individual who will make you pay for stuff like that. My
proposal: that comments to posts of the following format become standard
practice: PC (Please correct): [x should read y]. ETC (Erase this comment).

Scholar-bloggers fall into two categories. Those
that keep a blogroll and interact with a community of other bloggers, and those
that don’t. Those that don’t abuse the genre. Here is a list of the worst
offenders: [omitted by a thoughtful editor].

I’m not saying that to blog one must read
everything in the blogosphere on a given topic. That’s not even possible. But
one should fake it a little bit, as one does when writing an article for a
peer-reviewed journal. It’s easy to do. Go to Danny Zacharias’s site and use his search engines. Or just google
away. All kinds of stuff will show up in an instant. A sliver of it is probably
relevant to the post you are writing. Link to the pieces that suit your purpose.

There is nothing wrong with keeping a blog to
cultivate a fan base and sell your books and those of your friends. But it’s
possible to do that and interact with others who blog on topics that
interest you.

Great conversations went on the past month
among bloggers and commenters. An example: a back-and-forth on Rudolf Bultmann
which began with a remark by Sean Winter within a wide-ranging and brilliant
post, and ended with a duel between Jim West and Michael Bird
in which Jim conceded
(for now: I imagine it’s not Jim’s last word). Michael now owes Jim lunch, but
hey, what are friends for?

Michael Pitkowsky notes
the terminological debate around Jews, Judeans, and Judaism in Greco-Roman
antiquity. But he’s too kind or too smart to take sides. Phil Harland knows
where he stands. Loren Rosson weighs in here
and here.
In my view, Ellliot, Esler, Mason, Harland, and Rosson are guilty of simplistic
either-or reasoning. I’m with Amy Jill Levine, and bloggers April DeConick (here
and here)
and Doug Chaplin (here).
When Torry Seland, who knows
Esler’s work well, starts referring to Philo the Judean, maybe it’ll be time to
revisit the question.

As is often necessary in terminological
debates, it is important to disentangle various threads that tend to be
confused. Four things can be, but are not necessarily are, bound up in the use
of gentilics in Greek of the relevant period: geographical provenance,
language, ethnicity, and religion. “Inhabitants of Judea”
and “Judeans” in Acts 2:9, 11 clearly refer to different sets of people: they
overlap but cannot be equated. That being the case, “Judeans,” which in English
has, inevitably, a geographical ring to it, must be translated by “Jews” in
Acts 2:11. I am happy to be corrected, but I don’t see how those who wish to
reserve the terms of “Judaism” and the “Jews” for coreligionists of a later
period can get around this. It also nonsensical, in English, to refer to someone
as both a Parthian and a Judean (once again, see Acts 2:9, 11). A “Parthian Jew”
is correct diction.

Matt Dabbs talks
about the distribution of imperatives in Ephesians: “Many people have
pointed out the fact that the book of Ephesians has 41 imperatives (commands)
in Greek. Only 1 is found in the first three chapters and 40 are found in the
last three chapters. Before Paul gives guidelines for living the Christian life
(chapters 4-6) he loads them up on truths about what God has done for us
through Christ (chapters 1-3).”

Slow down, Matt. Ephesians begins with a berakhah
(blessing) of a kind that must have been recurrent in early Christian worship
(1:3-14). It continues with thanksgiving (1:15-23), confessional affirmation
(2:1-22), autobiographical recollection (3:1-13), and prayer (3:14-20) before
moving on to parenesis (imperative-filled instruction: 4:1-6:17). Doxology, thanksgiving,
recollection, and prayer are all essential pre-texts to parenesis.

Angela Erisman Roskop is smoothly
blogging about writing. I do have a complaint about Bible blogdom: not enough
snarkiness on questions of style. Where is Miss Snark when you need her?

What happens when people read a lot of blogs
and comment on interesting posts? They start their own blog, of course. Scott
Gray is off to a fine start with a lectionary beyond belief. The
good people at textweek.com have not yet
figured out how to link to Bible blogdom’s relevant resources in a suitable
way. But when that happens – it’s only a matter of time – people who write
interesting things about specific passages are going to see the number of hits
they receive climb precipitously.

Most publishing house and publication blogs I’ve
seen are tame and predictable. Not so these two: Theolog (Christian Century) and Addenda & Errata (IVP).
That’s because Jason Byassee, Amy Frykholm, and Dan Reid among others are spunky,
outside-the-box writers. I hope they start linking to discussions in Bible
blogdom. I certainly plan to begin linking to them.

David over at World Perspectives with New Objectives
has this to say in a post
tagged under Bible: “Truly, I find this Christian emphasis on Hell, fire and
brimstone to bear little fruit. It only brings fear and faith based on fear. I
fail to understand why some believers in the Christos Word of God cannot seem
to get out of the ‘Hell Pit.’” The web is full of people like David who are
articulate and ready to engage in honest dialogue. That would make for an
interesting series of posts: a Bible blogathon on hell and heaven and
resurrection. But it’s people like David I would want to be part of the
discussion.

But let us put all of this religious crud
behind us for a moment, and talk about: politics! James Bradford Pate is not
politically correct and it shows.
But I think he is insightful and has thought through a lot of things.

What happens if you are just starting to
learn about a religious tradition which is not your own, and you blog
about it? Well, you might get stomped
on by someone who cares deeply about that tradition. Jason, I think, comes
out of this experience a better man. I hope Iyov keeps speaking his mind, and
showing us that he – an orthodox Jew - knows more about things like Luther’s
views on private reading of the Bible than most Christians do.

Let me change the subject slightly. The
online neighborhood is full of pea-shooters. I like the sport myself. The part
where I bean someone else, that is.

James McGrath has a fine
post about biblical archeology with both Lara Croft and Indiana Jones in
the title. It doesn’t get much better than that! His purpose: to point out the
sterling work of Eric Cline. He links to an article
by Cline in which Cline says it’s high time trained archaeologists and biblical
scholars fight back against biblical archaeology falsely so-called. Duane
Smith and many others have taken note of Cline’s article.

The most thorough blogger as far as
necrologies go: the inimitable Stefan (go here and here). Moule,
Metzger, Webber, Kline, Brown, Pelikan, Tollinchi, and Childs are all
dispatched. If you know half as much about these people as Esteban does, that
makes you more learned than the rest of us.

I’ve gone on long enough, haven’t I? For
those whose Sitzfleisch (flesh for sitting: the ability to sit in one place for
hours on end) allows it, a “Biblical Studies Carnival XXIII: What I Left out
the First Time” follows.

UPDATE: For important threads I fail to mention
above, see Mark Goodacre’s comments
here.

SECOND UPDATE: For further detailed metablogging
in the realm of Bible blogdom, check out Peter Nathan’s remarkable blog.
He tracks a number of topics and conversations I overlooked.

Believing is KnowingComments on things like prophecy, predestination, and reward and punishment from an orthodox Jewish perspective, by David Guttmann

Ben Byerly's Blogthoughts on the Bible, Africa, Kenya, aid, and social justice, by Ben Byerly, a PhD candidate at Africa International University (AIU), in Nairobi, Kenya working on “The Hopes of Israel and the Ends of Acts” (Luke’s narrative defense of Paul to Diaspora Judeans in Acts 16-20)

C. OrthodoxyChristian, Contemporary, Conscientious… or Just Confused, by Ken Brown, a very thoughtful blog (archive). Ken is currently a Dr. Theol. student at Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, part of The Sofja-Kovalevskaja Research Group studying early Jewish Monotheism. His dissertation will focus on the presentation of God in Job.

Catholic Biblesa thoughtful blog about Bible translations by Timothy, who has a degree in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome (Angelicum) and teaches theology in a Catholic high school in Michigan

Chrisendomirreverent blog with a focus on the New Testament, by Chris Tilling, New Testament Tutor for St Mellitus College and St Paul's Theological Centre, London

Claude Mariottinia perspective on the Old Testament and current events by a professor of Old Testament at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Chicagoland, Illinois

Codex: Biblical Studies Blogspotby Tyler Williams, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and cognate literature, now Assistant Professor of Theology at The King's University College in Edmonton, Alberta (archive)

Colours of Scripturereflections on theology, philosophy, and literature, by Benjamin Smith, afflicted with scriptural synaesthesia, and located in London, England

ComplegalitarianA team blog that discusses right ways and wrong ways Scripture might help in the social construction of gender (old archive only; more recent archive, unfortunately, no longer publicly available)

Connected Christianitya place to explore what it might be like if Christians finally got the head, heart, and hands of their faith re-connected (archive)

Conversational TheologySmart and delightful comment by Ros Clarke, a Ph.D. student at the University of the Highlands and Islands, at the (virtual) Highland Theological College (archive)

Daily HebrewFor students of biblical Hebrew and the ancient Near East, by Chip Hardy, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago

Daniel O. McClellana fine blog by the same, who is pursuing a master of arts degree in biblical studies at Trinity Western University just outside of Vancouver, BC.

Davar AkherLooking for alternative explanations: comments on things Jewish and beyond, by Simon Holloway, a PhD student in Classical Hebrew and Biblical Studies at The University of Sydney, Australia

Evedyahuexcellent comment by Cristian Rata, Lecturer in Old Testament of Torch Trinity Graduate School of Theology, Seoul, Korea

Exegetica Digitadiscussion of Logos high-end syntax and discourse tools – running searches, providing the downloads (search files) and talking about what can be done and why it might matter for exegesis, by Mike Heiser

Law, Prophets, and Writingsthoughtful blogging by William R. (Rusty) Osborne, Assistant Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies as College of the Ozarks and managing editor for Journal for the Evangelical Study of the Old Testament

Lingamishdelightful fare by David Ker, Bible translator, who also lingalilngas.

old testament passionGreat stuff from Anthony Loke, a Methodist pastor and Old Testament lecturer in the Seminari Theoloji, Malaysia

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha BlogA weblog created for a course on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, by James Davila (archive)

On the Main LineMississippi Fred MacDowell's musings on Hebraica and Judaica. With a name like that you can't go wrong.

p.ost an evangelical theology for the age to comeseeking to retell the biblical story in the difficult transition from the centre to the margins following the collapse of Western Christendom, by Andrew Perriman, independent New Testament scholar, currently located in Dubai

PaleoJudaicaby James Davila, professor of Early Jewish Studies at the University of St. Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland. Judaism and the Bible in the news; tidbits about ancient Judaism and its context

Serving the Wordincisive comment on the Hebrew Bible and related ancient matters, with special attention to problems of philology and linguistic anthropology, by Seth L. Sanders, Assistant Professor in the Religion Department of Trinity College, Hartford, CT

Targumanon biblical and rabbinic literature, Christian theology, gadgetry, photography, and the odd comic, by Christian Brady, associate professor of ancient Hebrew and Jewish literature and dean of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State

The Biblia Hebraica Bloga blog about Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, the history of the Ancient Near East and the classical world, Syro-Palestinian archaeology, early Judaism, early Christianity, New Testament interpretation, English Bible translations, biblical theology, religion and culture, philosophy, science fiction, and anything else relevant to the study of the Bible, by Douglas Magnum, PhD candidate, University of the Free State, South Africa

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